Needle in the Haystack?

I’m passingly skeptical that Tidemark has a magical solution to the problem of spreadsheet overload but Haines makes an excellent point.

If you are in charge of IT and a significant part of your business is running on a maze of spreadsheets or any other office productivity software, you are probably failing. You need to find a way to get the business the right tools because 500 spreadsheets is definitely not the answer.

This is so true. 500 different spreadsheets, or 500 different reports (possibly one and the same thing) – it is not the way to run your business. Those spreadsheets are telling you something…

Unfortunately if you have that many, you’ve created a haystack. And now the trick is to find the needle of real value that is hidden among the hay. If it doesn’t drive decision-making it is probably superfluous (like the vanity stats that startups sometimes fall into the trap of tracking).